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AMD Reports $611 Million Loss
mpfife writes "Toms Hardware reports that declining microprocessor sales have pushed AMD deeply into the red. 'The company reported a net loss of $611 million on revenues of $1.233 billion, which is more than 20% below the guidance the company expected at the end of Q4 2006. The loss includes charges related to the ATI acquisition in the amount of $113 million, but is mainly a result of the increasing competition with Intel in the microprocessor market.'"
Do we risk going back to having only one big CPU producer?
I seem to recall that Solaris is now also based on Intel chips (or was that AMD chips).
I have always been buying Intel CPU's until now, but still I am rather fond of AMD as they have forced Intel to get their act together. Solaris is the OS, Sparc is the traditional CPU in their boxes. I forget the true name of the box, but Sun Fire can support AMD CPUs.
Why UNIX?
While it is true that they are in a world of hurt right now, they have taken concrete actions that should deliver another round of highly profitable quarters, and their new quad core processors and power consumption ratings should result in their usage in a lot of boxen.
That plus the breakdown of the MSFT monopoly and the Wintel dictatorship (disclosure - I have owned MSFT before, and own I think 400 shares of Intel) with the low cost push and power push for PCs and laptops using processor chips, should mean they will return to profit in short order.
The market always projects 4-6 months ahead, except in Japan and Europe where it tends to project 6-18 months ahead.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No they were just not sufficiently on top to be able to generate the capital required to upgrade their fabs to the level where they could match Intels volume of production. This has largely precluded them from being able to clinch the big money deals with Dell,HP etc. AMD's chips were excellent, there just weren't enough of them.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I think that you're overlooking other architectural and production reasons for there being comparably less cache on the Athlon64 dies. My (single-core) Turion64 has 1024 KiB of L2 cache, and came out shorly before AMD shrunk their cache sizes and moved to DDR2 memory.
The issue has two potential causes: one is smaller silicon die space allows AMD to sell more chips to Dell, low-end whitebox builders and enthusiasts, which must also come with the admission that the K8 architecture was never going to hold on to the performance crown after the arrival of Core. The other is that the on-die memory interface with DDR2 memory causes so small a performance gain for having larger L2 cache that it's not even worth the branding pissing contest (and it's also possible that the Turion64 X2 has 256KiB for energy efficiency reasons). If you want to compare the Athlon 64 FX-53 Clawhammer and Athlon 63 3800+ Newcastle -- same generation, clock speed and memory frequency -- at http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html, there is a benefit for having the 1 MiB L2 on the Clawhammer over the Newcastle, albeit a marginal one.
I'll contest that the Pentium D was a Pentium III, but was instead a dual-processor Prestcott Pentium 4 without the HyperThreading capabilities. I'll also contest that your AMD64 3000+ would be a huge amount better for the additional cache. On-die cache was a trick Intel pulled to try and improve the Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Xeon and Itanium perforance, and while it helps performance, I'm not convinced huge L2 cahces are essential.